Terrol Dew Johnson and Contemporary Basketry

Illustration: Terrol Dew Johnson. Form Over Function #1.

Terrol Dew Johnson started basketry weaving at the age of ten. He soon learned that he was a born natural and found that it was one of the few things in life that he found intrinsically effortless.

Johnson is a member of the Tohono O'odham nation of southern Arizona. The Tohono O'odham have a long history of basket weaving using a whole variety of techniques using natural materials and dyes. These are all used in order to tie the basketry in with the local landscape colours and flora, making the baskets part of the community and of the larger landscape.

Illustration: Terrol Dew Johnson.

The traditional basketry weaving techniques that Johnson learnt at such an early age, have allowed him to expand into the world of contemporary fine art basketry, while still keeping hold of his traditions, which he uses as a foundation or anchor point for his subsequent career as an artist.

Johnson has definitely turned the craft skill of basketry into an art form. His basket weaving techniques now see him producing work that is sculptural in form, with the pieces quietly but confidently filling their internal and external space. His basketry creations have extended one of the earliest human learned skills, much beyond its original practical remit, and although his creations do still maintain some of the traits of a traditional basket, as much of his work still has the appearance of the functional containers that were woven by early humans, he has been able to play with that notion and that traditional form, producing pieces that although serving no practical purpose, are still able to pay homage to the rich local and wider planetary history of basket weaving.

Illustration: Terrol Dew Johnson. Basket.

Terrol Johnson is now one of the most popular basketry weavers in the United States. His work has won major awards and has been seen in various exhibitions across the country. A number of prestigious museums and galleries are now eagerly procuring examples of his work for their collections.

Johnson is now a respected artist who has been able to expand his interests into other creative areas including architecture and photography, but it is his commitment to basketry weaving and more particularly how that can be used to help his Tohon O'dham community, that will perhaps be his greatest legacy.

Illustration: Terrol Dew Johnson. Basket.

Terrol Johnson has his own website, which can be found here. There is also an interesting article by Loretts Gallery of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which can be found here.

Johnson is involved in a number of pressing issues and enterprises concerning his Tohono O'odham community, all of which can be found at the TOCA (Tohona O'odham Community Action) website, which can be found here.

Reference links:
Terrol Dew Johnson
Lovetts Gallery
TOCA (Tohono O'odham Community Action)

Hip To Flip On 8mm

I’m looking at 8mm again. There’s no good reason really. Could it be the lingering allure of its abysmal low tech-ness? Nostalgia surely factors in. Or maybe it’s rebellion against digitally scrubbed pictures looking too good. I collected the tiny gauge (all the more so as my vision clouds with age) from 1964 to 1973. Those who stayed with film will assert tactile quality it possesses and hands-on projector operation as sole avenues toward a purer viewing experience. I’d not argue with that. Some also favor vinyl as opposed to CD’s. Digital formats are impersonal. They’ve deprived us of physical contact between collectors and what they collect. DVD looks and sounds better, but there’s a sensation one gets from threading up a show and finessing it to completion. Will your lamp blow? What if a bad splice or torn sprocket trips up the works? These were stresses that once factored into shows I gave. Now it’s an effort staying awake through DVD’s once started. To revive 8mm means going in search of artifacts others stopped caring about long ago. Equipment you’ll use is no longer being manufactured. Even the replacement bulbs are middle-aged. There are forums for 8mm enthusiasts online. Some identify themselves as Master Film Handlers. They can take apart and put together an Elmo in a dark room using a flashlight. I’ve wished lately for such skill, as projectors off Ebay are invariably fixer-uppers (even ones they call Brand New). Veterans warned me. Any 8mm machine is at least thirty years old. Rubber drive belts, gears dormant since Nixon’s presidency, and sound hopelessly muffled … these are hallmarks of a gauge forever gone. Don’t expect 8mm to fire up and run just for plugging it in. Wiser heads would say forget the whole thing. Enjoy your memories and never mind recapturing them. Has the effort been worth it for me? Yes, and then some. It’s fun having toys again I can really play with. Beaten remnants of projectors I once used include the Bell and Howell Regent my father brought home in the late forties (there must have been a million sold, as Ebay is never without dozens), and the Eumig Dual 8 sound model I longed for and received in 1969. Neither work, and won’t again. They are mantle pieces now, broken on the wheel of rust and parts worn out. Am I so corroded as my Eumig for the passage of forty years?

There were guys in Syracuse and Columbus who could repair 8mm junkers I bought off Ebay. For their having applied work bench magic, my recently acquired projectors run like tops. I’d kept some Blackhawk and Castle Films from adolescence and was anxious to play them again. Of course, that led to more Ebay bidding for subjects I’d disposed of before and ones that looked to be fun now. Best so far have been cartoons Blackhawk once sold featuring Flip The Frog. I looked at 1930’s Puddle Pranks and reveled in its scratches and lines, having frankly missed those too long for living in my cocoon of flawless digital resolution. Distressed film has integrity. It’s been places. If only 8mm prints could tell their stories, other than ones they project on a screen. Maybe some of these I’m buying now once belonged to me, and somehow made the trek back, like Lassie the time he/she got locked into a fruit truck and went on his/her odyssey. Cartoons especially should be viewed on film. Their drawings move, after all, from frame to frame. You could hold one up to a light and examine the artist’s work. Try doing that with a DVD. Flip The Frog is my ideal of an 8mm subject. He’s primitive and extinct just like machinery I watch him on. Ub Iwerks was the pioneering genius that produced the Flips and lots of other independent cartoons besides. Somehow Blackhawk ended up with surviving negatives in 1974. They needed something to compete with the Walter Lantz subjects Castle Films was selling to armchair showmen. Major companies wouldn’t lease (Disney in fact offered their own home movies), so Iwerks’ backlog, many out of circulation since theatres last ran them, filled a void for collectors who wanted animation to play with Chaplin and Laurel/Hardy shorts. These were waning days for black-and-white cartoons as viable inventory for any seller. Soon enough such ancient fare would be exiled from television, other than as objects of bemusement and ridicule on kid programs like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.

The problem for anyone that worked with Walt Disney is shade they'd forever occupy afterward. He was the biggest noise in cartooning and no one else in the organization stood a prayer of getting recognition. Ub Iwerks had started with Walt in Kansas City when both were boys. It looked for a while like they’d stay equal partners, but Disney worked easier with people and thus forged ahead. Iwerks was like so many geniuses who functioned best when left alone. He designed Mickey Mouse and drew the early cartoons single-handed, turning out seven hundred sheets a day when release push came to shove. Walt paid Ub more than he himself drew from the till. Sneak in the grass Pat Powers, who distributed Disney shorts mostly to the extent of skimming what profits he could off the latter’s share, sensed Iwerk’s frustrated ambition and lured him with promises of independence and status to equal Walt’s. The resulting series (begun in 1930) got a flying start when MGM agreed to handle Flip, a sort of poster frog for precode abandon and vessel through which Ub Iwerks explored darker animating impulses. Of all cartoons I’ve watched from the early thirties, these may be the nastiest. Had television played them (did they?), there might well have been parent complaints. Flip morphed from excessively froggish, almost grotesquely so, to a more palatable bow-tie look and near human Betty Boop-ish femme accompaniment as Iwerks (and Metro) slow pushed his character to a short-lived peak around 1932. There were even efforts to merchandise Flip in ways evoking runaway success of Mickey Mouse toys and doo-dads. Children’s books (like one below) and figurines based on the Frog must surely be hot pursued collectibles today, for how many would have sold at depression whacked counters with Mickey items displayed alongside?

The Flips are currently among those sold on DVD as Cartoons That Time Forgot. A little sad when you consider the hopes invested in Iwerk’s creation and others he imagined would lift him to Disney’s pantheon. There was also Willie Whopper and a series called ComicColor, the latter relegated to State’s Rights distribution after Metro bailed on further Iwerks/Powers output. Not that any of these cartoons were/are bad. Like everyone who tried competing head-on with Walt, Iwerks went down in defeat. He eventually wound to Disney’s as a salaried employee. Men like Ub Iwerks strike me as Magnificent Failures for having reached toward a sky with room for but one King Of Cartoons (other companies competed successfully with Disney, but no individual could). There was something heroic going on there. Historians tend to characterize 30’s independent animation as unconventional, even bizarre. That just shows how thoroughly Disney’s model defined the art even as men like Iwerks, Van Beuren, and Fleischer struggled to challenge it. In the end, of course, Disney won. No wonder we view these competitors as outlaws. It’s somehow fitting that on-the-margins Blackhawk Films would acquire the Iwerks library in 1974, then sell them to eccentrics bent upon showing movies on hanging sheets. As long as there is appetite for cartoons put adrift, Flip will endure. His thirty-eight cartoons (wow --- they did that many?) are presently owned by Film Preservation Associates. Search me as to what if any rights the Iwerks family might maintain in the character. A better question might be … who’d bother infringing? I’ve seen time-warped Ebay listings for Flip toys and even a set of buttons like ones shown above, but no one’s likely to get rich selling these. There are two volumes on Image DVD that contain many Flips and others of what Iwerks produced, all with best surviving quality. I’ve avoided going into too much depth about individual Iwerks cartoons in deference to really superb and definitive liner notes provided by Greg Ford for the disc release. A wonderful documentary about Ub Iwerks written and produced by his granddaughter is an extra on Disney’s Oswald The Rabbit DVD from the company’s Treasures series. It is essential viewing for anyone interested in this great animator’s life and work.

Re-edit medical history film

A new addition to the Wellcome Film project has been made: downloadable videos to keep, edit and watch as you wish from your own computer. The videos are H.264 (MPEG4) format and broadband resolution (2Mbps), easily playable by both Mac and PC users. To download, simply find the title you want in the catalogue searching the Wellcome Film homepage, and click on the 'Download entire title' link in the catalogue record.

All videos on the Wellcome Film website are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commerial 2.0 UK licence, so go ahead and edit away! If you do use any of our videos in one of your projects, please let us know by leaving a comment on our blog or on our YouTube channel - we'd love to see them!

In other Wellcome Film news, our YouTube channel was featured on Wired's website bringing a new audience to these medical films. The most popular video as a result of this is now Prefrontal Tuberculoma, a 1933 surgical film showing the removal of a brain tumour caused by tuberculosis (not for the faint of heart - see below).

Author: Lucy Smee

Free workshops at the Wellcome Library

Our team of library and archive professionals are offering a series of short practical sessions to help you to discover and take advantage of the variety of Wellcome Library resources.

The new Autumn programme of workshops begins on October 13th 2009.

There are workshops introducing resources in the medical humanities, visual resources (including the Wellcome Images database), contemporary themes such as science in the news, and training on specific resources such as electronic journals and PubMed.

You can also pick up expert tips on researching our collections at workshops about the Library catalogues.

The workshops last approximately one hour and are open to all, with membership of the Library.

Places are limited and booking is essential. Use the calendar to find out more, or book a place on any of the workshops.

Author: Lalita Kaplish

Royal Albert Hall - Nigel Kennedy

It's 20 years since Nigel Kennedy released Vivaldi, the four seasons. The first time a classical record hit the charts, selling over 2 million copies.
He didn't fit the stereotypical classical musician, upsetting many with his style and appearance.

He played here at the Royal Albert Hall in 2000 with the Who. Later released on an album Live at the Royal Albert Hall.

You can win a copy of the 20th anniversary edition of Vivaldi the four seasons

What do you need to do?

Simply leave a comment of some other significant event in September 1989. It can be major or personal, over to you.

The best, wittiest, cleverest entry wins.

Anyone can enter.

The winner will be anounced on Friday

Azerbaijani Embroidery

Although Azerbaijan by definition is often seen as within the sphere, if not actually part of Persia/Iran, it does have a definite identity of its own and whether as a region or as an independent nation. Its identity is often reflected, as with most communities, within its native arts and crafts, and no more so than the textiles of the region, in particular its embroidery.

It is said that the roots of Azerbaijani embroidery lie in the Bronze Age, and while this cannot be definitely proved, the motifs and design work used in the native embroidery of the area, can trace its history back through generations of Azerbaijani cultural history and the general design and craft history of the region.

Azerbaijan has a rich and varied textile history with a particular emphasis on weave, knit and embroidery. Many richly decorated fabrics were produced in the past using silk, gold and silver threads, which were worked onto a relatively thick background fabric, which often included various rich velvets. Local pearls and beads were also added to these richly decorated pieces of handwork to add to the emphasis of richness and depth. Colour was another form used to emphasise the richness of the work with colours of both threads and backgrounds often being dazzlingly heightened, all adding to the overall display effect.

The best and most expensive embroidery work was produced for the royal court of Azerbaijan, mostly in the form of wall hangings, which were often used as statements of wealth and power to visiting dignitaries. However, less expensive and less detailed work was also widely produced, though no less accomplished. This work was mainly designated for domestic use and the decoration of clothing. Embroidery was also used to decorate objects as diverse as riding equipment, and dowry items.

Much of the design work, though not exclusively so, was floral or geometrically based, though traditional Persian motifs that were often used within the carpet trade were also incorporated into the vocabulary of Azerbaijani embroidery.

Interestingly, the production of embroidery was not limited to women. Men were also involved in the work and took an active part in the design and decoration aspects of the medium.

The images shown here were produced by the Soviet Union for the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. It was part of a large national exhibition promoting the traditional crafts from across the Union.

Although embroidery is not produced on such a scale as it once was, Azerbaijan is still proud of its embroidery heritage and historical pieces can be seen in many of the museums of the country and at regular exhibitions. Some good examples can be seen at the Azerbaijani Ministry of Culture and Tourism website, which can be seen here

Further reading links:
Embroidery: Traditional Designs, Techniques, and Patterns from All over the World
The Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Azerbaijani Republic
Azerbaijan Since Independence
Transcaucasus: Georgia, Armenia, & Azerbaijan
Cuisines of the Caucasus Mountains: Recipes, Drinks, and Lore from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia
Azerbaijan - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
Azerbaijan: Traditional Music
Azerbaijan: Webster's Timeline History, 10000 BC - 2007
Azerbaijan (Cultures of the World)
Music from Azerbaijan

Why Complete a Year-Long Study of a Nature Subject?

The Autumn Series of Outdoor Hour Challenges contain several year-long nature studies. Challenge #1 was to find a cattail to observe during each season. Challenge #2 was to find a tree in your yard to watch and record changes in over the next four seasons. We will also be completing a seasonal weather study very soon as part of the Autumn Series of challenges.

What is the value of completing these year-long nature studies? Why go to all that effort?

"Children should be encouraged to make notes about the same plants or birds for several consecutive years. Each year will bring some new things to their notice and a fuller knowledge of the ways and habits of their subject. It is a tremendous encouragement to find that one has discovered some peculiar little habit of a plant or bird purely by frequent and careful watching and not by reading about it in some book."
The Charm of Nature Study, Parents Review, May 6th, 1930.

We have worked our way through a year-long study of two trees so far and we are eager to pick a new tree starting with this Autumn Series challenge. Getting up close and watching the changes as the seasons go by has brought an intimate knowledge of each tree.


My boys can tell you what birds and animals they have seen in the tree. They can tell you the differences between the two trees.


They can recognize the type of tree wherever it grows now. The slowing down and the focusing is the key.

I encourage you all to give the year-long nature study a try. It is not too late to get started with the cattail study, the tree study, or both. If you do not have a tree in your yard, pick a tree in a place that you frequently visit. Perhaps there is a tree near your grocery store, at the library, or growing in a park that you have near-by. This study works where ever you live. Keep it informal if you wish and make observations every time you see your tree.


The nature journal entry is a great way to record your observations but a photo will do just as well.
Young children can describe their tree in each season with words, noticing the color of the leaves and the bark, the texture of the bark, the size of the trunk, the shape of the leaves, or the smell of the blossoms. There are no rules to the year-long nature study....make it your own. If you don't have a cattail to study, pick some other plant in your area to observe in each season. Keep an open mind and give it a try. :)

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Wellcome Library Insight - Medi-cinema

This week's free Wellcome Library Insight session, 'Medi-cinema' - on Thursday 1st October, 3pm - explores our Moving Image and Sound Collections.

The session offers an opportunity to find out how our curators preserve film and video, and also to view some of the fascinating films in our holdings.

Regent's St Festival

Capturing the festivities at Sunday's festival.

Tomorrow there will be a new competition.

Early Autumn: First of Many Walks

We took a long walk today to enjoy the last of the hot afternoons...we know they will be coming to an end soon. Here are a few things I want to share from our day.


This is a sure sign that autumn is coming quickly. The aspens are beginning to change color and the wind makes them shimmer and shake.


The Kokanee salmon are spawning and their green and red color is brilliant in the clear creek water.



The creek is very shallow and the salmon come here to lay their eggs and die. This becomes a habitat for eagles and bears and ducks this time of year. Can you guess why?


If you click this photo it will enlarage and you will see the outline of a bear at the bottom of the photo among the trees. She was on the other side of the creek sharing a salmon with her baby. We gave her a lot of space and the few of us that were there snapped a few photos and left her in peace.



The whole afternoon was picture postcard perfect.



The Pussy Paws are golden and the goldenrod is golden and the pines are green and the sky is blue......where are my paints?

This was a great afternoon and I feel so refreshed.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Gideon Koppel chats to Aesthetica

[Image credits: Image of Gideon Koppel, copyright David Swindells. Further images stills from Sleep Furiously]

As Aesthetica is teaming up with the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Exchange this October for the Inside Out Festival, we have had a chat with award-winning film-maker Gideon Koppel, an and academic at the Royal Holloway, in anticipation of his work at Inside Out Festival. Koppel will be leading a discussion with Theodore Zeldin about a new kind of film-based portaiture at the National Portrait Gallery. There will also be a screening and panel discussion of his mesmerising film Sleep Furiously.

See the latest issue of Aesthetica (Issue 31, Oct/Nov) for a Q&A with fellow Inside Out contributor Julian Stallabrass, as the writer, curator, photographer and lecturer discusses art and the economy, globalisation and the image.

Can you tell me a bit about inside out festival and how you got involved with that?
As I understand it, the Festival is a way of making more public the work of academics and exploring the space between what’s deemed commercial public work and what goes on in Universities.

Can you tell me a bit about your section at Inside Out?
I am both an artist/film-maker and academic at Royal Holloway where I teach an MA in documentary. My film ‘Sleep Furiously’ was a research output – so it is gratifying that it has gone on to be one of the most visible British independent films this year I think that it was Andrew O’Hagan who described it as one “the most beautifully elemental documentary films to have emerged in Britain in over a decade...” As well as a screening of the film followed by a discussion with Ian Christie, Annette Kuhn and Philip Crang, Theodore Zeldin and I will be talking about our explorations to find new forms of portraiture.

You’re discussing a new kind of portraiture at the festival, how far do you feel it’s possible to reflect the complexity of modern individuals in a film-based portrait?I’m not concerned with absolutes - that is to say I’m more interested in the question whether it is possible that any notion of an answer. I think that it is also important to recognize that it what you are asking is a two way process: perhaps the ways of looking at and experiencing portraiture might change, as well as the portraits which are being made.

Do you think it was more important in Sleep Furiously to make a statement about the community or more to simply reflect its nature?
I have to answer that question by saying that Sleep Furiously isn’t intended to be a film ABOUT the community of Trefeurig, so in that sense I don’t regard the film as ‘a documentary’ - or at least what documentary has become associated with now. For me the film is more to do with moments of intimacy, human gesture… and juxtaposing them with sense of space and time of the landscape. Then the landscape of sleep furiously for me is much more of an internal landscape than an external landscape. And it has a quality of childhood about it. In that sense it has a quality of my own childhood; but I’ve tried to make it have more universal sensibilities. The journey of the film could be described as one from nature to culture.

Does the paradoxical nature of the title reflect the cyclical events of the film?
I think your way of understanding it is really interesting and I really like that, but I don’t want to get involved in analysing my own work right now. In a way your question links to an aspect of the film. I think we live in a world which is so demanding of empirical truths that it becomes like a sort of cultural fascism: people want to know what something is ABOUT rather than simply experiencing it. In a way the title of a film or painting works in a more associative level – it can offer clues but I don’t think it’s for the artist or filmmaker to EXPLAIN it.

How do you feel the economic recession has hit film, do you think it’s important to film?
Yes, filmmaking is affected by the economic climate. Filmmaking is still - perhaps - unnecessarily expensive.

Do you think its affect is important to you in your work?
In any kind of creative process, the restrictions that you work with are a part of the work and you find ways of improvising and adapting around whatever limitations evolve. There always will be constraints.

Do you feel that globalisation and the rise of online culture have changed the role and value of contemporary film?
I don’t know. I mean all it makes me feel is that there’s so much stuff out there. There’s too much stuff. I don’t think that anyone need make another film…

Some people maybe think that’s liberating, do you think its degrading to the value of things when there’s too much of it?
No I don’t think it's degrading; I think that it becomes a bit overwhelming.

Everyone talks about contemporary artists pushing the boundaries of art and culture do you think film does this in the same way?
I don’t know how you distinguish between a filmmaker and an artist. For me, the film makers who are interesting are artists… they are people that are in some way innovative or most importantly provoke me to look at the world in a different way.

Do you think the idea of film as a more commercial form of art needs to be changed in some way?
There have always been very different kinds of cinema and the boundaries are constantly changing. I would be happier if there was less categorization. You know that when ‘sleep furiously’ was released non of the ‘tabloid press’ came to see it at the press screenings. They branded it too arty without even having the curiousity to check it out. Then their fascistic form of censorship is handed out to their readership. I guess this is what politicians call democracy.

Do you feel that in a world where the image is everywhere and we operate on a visual basis, do you think that visual film and documentary has a world altering impact any longer?
Well it seems to me that since the 1920s, film makers and artists from Vertov to more contemporary practitioners like Chris Marker have used notions of documentary as a way of making work and qualifying work that didn’t have a conventional screen play or a conventional script. That is to say, making work which is open ended. So I think that you’ve got to use the word documentary very cautiously: documentary was once an idiom of film making, and of fine art practice, and now it’s been conflated by broadcasters and even academics with factual television programme production. That is to say, polemical themes and journalistic structures prevail over visual observations and lyrical stories. The camera is used more as a recording device, than a kind of microscope which contains, discovers and evokes dynamics of the world that otherwise pass by unnoticed.

There’s this phrase of ‘compassion fatigue’ how do you feel about that as a label? And with a film such as yours which does seems to be intimate and personal as a way of going against this idea?
I don’t know the phrase. But as I understand it and in answer to your question I don’t make things to illicit specific response from the audience. That’s propaganda.

I think the soundtrack is very important- how do you feel the soundtrack to your film works with it, is it just as important as the visual for you?
I think of the sounds and the music in ‘sleep furiously’ as one. I think about the microphone like I do the camera – as a kind of microscope on the world. Not merely to record sounds that accompany or illustrate the image, but to create another dimension to the picture. This approach was developed in post production by Joakim Sundström – a brilliant sound supervisor – who created movements of sound which evoked the character-like presence of ‘the land’ and the ever-changing light, skies and weather. We talked about juxtapositions of scale – for instance rather than losing the tiny figure walking in the vastness of the landscape, she is given a particular presence as sound of her footsteps cuts through the gusting of wind.

Richard’s [Aphex Twin’s] music naturally found its way into the film from very early on in the editing process. It is not an accompaniment, but becomes an form of voice for the each of the main characters. I sent Richard a DVD of a rough edit of ‘sleep furiously’ – he really liked the film but was irritated by the way I had edited the music: cutting tracks short, repeating sections… we were both sorry that there wasn’t time for him to compose a specific soundtrack. The music is such a vital part of the film - I am really grateful to Richard for his support of the film.

So how do you feel that you’re going to move on from this? What’s your next plan?
Well I have several more projects that I’m working on, which one will be the next one, I’m not sure. The next one will be the one that’s financed first. I know what I want that to be but that’s not necessarily the one that’ll happen… but it never works like that

Could you tell me about the one you’d like to do next or is that under wraps until it happens?
I think it’s better to keep it under wraps, I think its tempting fate to discuss it.

Competition Update

Unfortunately Gillian is unable to make it to London by November to take up her wee break to Brussels prize.

The other finalists Gunn White, Frenchies in London, Bower Bird, Karen Billing, Ham have been put back in the lovely red hat for a redraw.

The winner is: Karen Billing,

Eid in Trafalgar Square

The festival of Eid is a festival, celebrated by Muslims, to mark the end of Ramadan. The festivities in Trafalgar Square on Saturday included great music, theatre, story telling, food stalls and lots of information.

Our Outdoor Hour: Crop Plants-Pumpkin Time

From last year....fields of pumpkins not too far from our house....taken as we cruised along in the car.

Pumpkin is one of our favorite ingredients for goodies in our family. Pumpkin pancakes, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin bread, and pumpkin pie are all partaken of year round. We started our pumpkins at the start of the Crop Plants Challenges but although the vines look healthy, there are plenty of blossoms, I fear we will not have a pumpkin crop from our garden this year.


It is a very good thing that Grandpa has been growing pumpkins right from the start and has been sharing his plants with us as they progress.

As part of our pumpkin study, we decided to make a pumpkin pie totally from scratch. This meant a phone call to Grandpa to ask if we could have one of his pumpkins from his garden. He responded quickly, "Of course!" He even delivered it to us and we got started.


Cutting the pumpkin was done with a big knife.


The guts of the pumpkin were scooped out first with a spoon but eventually that was set aside and bare hands were used. Lots of gushing around was done, seeds spilled on the floor, and strings stuck on the counter but it was ready to be cooked. We used a baking pan and the microwave to steam the pumpkin which took about 15 minutes at high.


Afterward we us used a food mill to smash the pumpkin and measure out exactly three cups of gorgeous golden pumpkin puree.


My youngest son actually made this pie all by himself.....crust and all. He used this recipe.

It took us hours to make the pie by the time we cut the pumpkin, cleaned it out, steamed it, pureed it, mixed up the crust, mixed up the pie filling, and baked it to perfection. Was it worth it? Absolutely! My son now has a great appreciation for how much work goes into a pumpkin pie from scratch. He also learned a lot about the structure of the pumpkin. Lastly, he was so proud of his pie and dished it up for dessert with a big smile on his face.

Great job Mr. B!

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Gorilla Race

The city went ape yesterday with 100's of gorillas let loose on the streets.

The Great Gorilla Race was all about raising awareness for gorillas in the wild. I can certainly vouch for awareness being raised among the crowds.